For anyone else who can never remember how much a hectare is and think "420 football fields" sounds more like some weed joke than an area: 300 hectares = 3 sq km / ~1.16 sq miles

If it's found they really did skip the required steps then I hope there is actual action about it.

It's also odd to me we seem to find the need to build AI DCs near population centers, in forests, and/or by/with new fossil fuel plants. Does it really matter so desperately if it takes your AI query an extra 10 ms to go to the middle of nowhere and we have to wait to build renewable or nuclear power to scale it for what we gain in return of that choice?

> Does it really matter so desperately if it takes your AI query an extra 10 ms to go to the middle of nowhere and we have to wait to build renewable or nuclear power to scale it?

The middle of nowhere in Finland is likely to be a forest (about 80% coverage).

The area being developed is roughly here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/f5vn3KaZ1eZEcNh67?g_st=ic

Nuclear power plants take a very long time to build, it can be 7-10 years before you even begin construction due to all the permits, politics and planning.

As for scaling massive amounts of solar/wind... that's exactly what China is doing to power their infrastructure buildouts.

> 300 hectares = 3 sq km / ~1.16 sq miles

How I managed to imagine it is that it is roughly the size of the Central Park in New York.

> For anyone else who can never remember how much a hectare is and think "420 football fields" sounds more like some weed joke than an area

It turns out there's something much weirder going on.

Here's an earlier article by Agence France-Presse ("AFP is one of the world's three major news agencies, and the only European one."): https://web.archive.org/web/20261004152900/https://www.afp.c...

And look at this:

>> "In our view, operations at this construction site should be suspended until it is clarified whether the project is in compliance with the law," Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the board of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, who filed the request with the agency, told AFP at the edge of the deforested area.

>> "From the satellite images, we've seen that nature sites which should be preserved have also been logged," she added, explaining that the size of the clear-cut area was comparable to 420 football fields.

I just can't bring myself to believe that a Finnish bureaucrat, speaking to a French news agency, explained that the area in question was comparable in size to 420 football fields.

And in fact the numbers don't seem to work. The area is estimated at "more than 300 hectares". 420 football fields is more like 224 hectares.

On the other hand, 420 soccer pitches would total 299.9 hectares. This tells us some interesting things:

1. The area in question may be "more than 300 hectares", but it's also less than 307 hectares (which could fit 430 soccer pitches). Or, alternatively, zero effort was made to express the actual cleared area in terms of soccer pitches, and it was first rounded to 300 hectares and then the rounded figure was converted to soccer pitches. (Which I have to assume was done by AFP and not by the Finnish government.)

2. Either the "global audience" that TechSpot serves doesn't include the United States, or they copied a French agency's English-language press release without bothering to consider whether any of the numbers in it made sense.

These new DC sites are literally middle of nowhere with major nearby renewable (hydro and wind) power plants.

Bbbbbut CHYNA